Archive for the ‘CDA’ Category

Recently the HHS Office of the National Coordinator announced the new and improved Blue Button+.  The original Blue Button initiative was aimed at making it easy for patient’s to access their personal health information in a useable and safe digital format. It started with the federal government and then spread to the private sector. The [...]

In the Healthcare Interoperability Glossary, interoperability is defined as “The ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged.” Even with the industry’s current focus on health information exchange and electronic health records, a truly interoperable healthcare system can at times seem as likely [...]

When the ONC released the Standards and Certification NPRM, the companion to the CMS Meaningful Use Stage 2 NPRM, the new standard for the electronic transfer of Care Summary was defined as §170.205(a)(3) Consolidated CDA. CCD, along with CCR, was the standard for Stage 1 of Meaningful Use, and CCD is a constraint on CDA. [...]

The IHE Connectathon event for 2012 was held in Chicago last week. Connectathon allows vendors from healthcare IT to test their ability to support IHE profiles, which are critical to standardizing communications across HIEs, ACOs, and across regions. Here are a few observations from my first-time participation at Connectathon: Industry Buy-in It was apparent from [...]

CCR … I’m sure there are days for those who work in Health IT and with the various health standards  when it would be a nice, mental break if those three letters represented what many recognize it as – Creedence Clearwater Revival. We could all take it easy like Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski, roll down [...]

The primary characteristic of a CDA document is that it must be readable by humans. The CDA specification states that, “human readability guarantees that a receiver of a CDA document can algorithmically display the clinical content of the note on a standard Web browser.” This requirement means that a clinician or patient can take a [...]

On September 9, the Health IT Policy Committee submitted a letter to the National Coordinator for Health IT, Dr. Farzad Mostashari, with recommendations for vocabulary standards. The committee recommends adopting and incorporating a smaller set of vocabulary standards into the Stage 2 certification requirements for Electronic Health Records (EHRs) Meaningful Use. The ONC offered a [...]

An interesting implementation question was recently submitted to the HL7 list serve for structured documents.  The question centered around the correct way to express “none” in a CDA instance.  In a general sense, “none” can have two meanings: A positive assertion. For example, a patient positively asserts no known allergies, no active medications, etc. An [...]

The need for interoperability is readily apparent in the healthcare industry. But what does interoperability mean with regards to richness of data? The CDA document is defined with three different levels of interoperability: Level 1: Includes the CDA Header plus a body consisting of an unstructured blob, such as PDF, DOC, or even a scanned [...]

There is little doubt that the first time you see the HL7 v3 RIM, or Reference Information Model, it will make you wonder how someone thought that this could make things easier. One of the key thoughts in moving from HL7 v2 to HL7 v3 is that the new v3 would be a model-driven methodology. [...]